W.G. Sebald

By W.G. SeballiterTranslated by Jo Catling From the renowned author of Austerlitz (named a Top 10 Book of the 21st Century by the New York Times) comes the first English translation of his extraordinary essays on the Austrian writers who shaped his life and work. Silent Catastrophes brings together the two books W.G. Sebald wrote on the Austrian writers who meant so much to him: The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991. As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighboring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Nazi Germany, meant that concepts such as “home/land,” “borderland” and “exile” occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own. Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth, and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude. This is an essential new edition from “a writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity” (The Guardian). Hardcover544 pagesRandom House, 20255.5 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9781400067725Literature

Silent Catastrophes: Essays

By W.G. SebaldTranslated by Michael Hulse “For all its dark contents and burden of undeclared grief, Vertigo is dizzyingly light and transparent.”—Benjamin Kunkel, The Village Voice“In Sebald's writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death... beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny—an art that was, in the end, Sebald's strange and inscrutable gift.”—Slate“Few writers make one more aware of the seductive powers of language.”—Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books Vertigo is the marvelous first novel by W.G. Sebald: "The most exciting, and most mysteriously sublime, of contemporary European writers" (James Wood, The New Republic). An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, journeys across Europe to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally to his childhood home in a small Bavarian village. He is also journeying into the past. Traveling in the footsteps of Stendhal, Casanova, and Kafka, the narrator draws the reader line by line into a dizzying web of history, biography, autobiography, legends, literature, and―most perilously―memories. Paperback272 pagesNew Directions, 2016Originally published in 19905.4 x 0.8 x 8 inchesISBN 9780811226165Travel, Biography, History

Vertigo

By W.G. SebaldTranslated by Michael Hulse “This is very beautiful, and its strangeness is what is beautiful... One of the most mysteriously sublime of contemporary writers. And here, in The Rings of Saturn, is a book more uncanny than The Emigrants.”—James Wood, The New Republic“Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. The Rings of Saturn glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit.”—Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review“Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia, The Rings of Saturn is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work.”—Robert McCrum, The London ObserverThe Rings of Saturn––with its curious archive of photographs––records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich. W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996) was hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece, perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read." It was "one of the great books of the last few years," noted Michael Ondaatje, who now acclaims The Rings of Saturn "an even more inventive work than its predecessor, The Emigrants."Paperback304 pagesW. W. Norton & Company, 2016Originally Published in 19955.5 x 0.9 x 8 inchesISBN 9780811226158Biographical Historical Fiction, Travel

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Silent Catastrophes: Essays

Vertigo

The Rings of Saturn

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W.G. Sebald